Resurrecting the Shark: A Scientific Obsession and the Mavericks Who Solved the Mystery of a 270-Million-Year-Old Fossil - Hardcover

A carefully annotated scientific detective story.

Ewing's talent for narrative makes the story of the diverse players a sure page-turner.

Ewing blows the dust off dry scientific reportage with her lively style and wit. Her book should have broad appeal to a wide range of readers--sharks, of course, are a cultural phenomenon, and paleo sharks only double the fun.

Ewing shares the century-long story of scientific investigation that resulted in the discovery of Helicoprion. Ewing brings to life the personalities of those who wrestled with these fossils to reveal 'the beautiful, frustrating, addictive, rewarding way' that research works.

A rocking good detective story with geology, art, and sharks!--David R. Montgomery, author of "Growing a Revolution" and "The Rocks Don't Lie"

In 1993, Alaskan artist and paleo-shark enthusiast Ray Troll stumbled upon the weirdest fossil he had ever seen—a platter-sized spiral of tightly wound shark teeth. This chance encounter in the basement of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County sparked Troll’s obsession with Helicoprion, a mysterious monster from deep time.In 2010, tattooed undergraduate student and returning Iraq War veteran Jesse Pruitt became seriously smitten with a Helicoprion fossil in a museum basement in Idaho. These two bizarre-shark disciples found each other, and an unconventional band of collaborators grew serendipitously around them, determined to solve the puzzle of the mysterious tooth whorl once and for all.Helicoprion was a Paleozoic chondrichthyan about the size of a modern great white shark, with a circular saw of teeth centered in its lower jaw—a feature unseen in the shark world before or since. For some ten million years, long before the Age of Dinosaurs, Helicoprion patrolled the shallow seas around the supercontinent Pangaea as the apex predator of its time.Just a few tumultuous years after Pruitt and Troll met, imagination, passion, scientific process, and state-of-the-art technology merged into an unstoppable force that reanimated the remarkable creature—and made important new discoveries.In this groundbreaking book, Susan Ewing reveals these revolutionary insights into what Helicoprion looked like and how the tooth whorl functioned—pushing this dazzling and awe-inspiring beast into the spotlight of modern science.